Not easy to share links to content. Commenting feature lets you write your opinion without first seeing what others have said. Animated gifs appear as static images. Can't edit profile.

Bottom Line

The Google+ iPad app won't attract new users to Google's social network, and doesn't provide a good way for current users to get into their content beyond light browsing.

iPad fans aren't quiet when it comes to calling for apps they want. They've paid good money for a gorgeous tablet, and they're not shy about demanding apps that fill the 9.7-inch screen. To see an app designed for an iPhone running on its larger counterpart does impart the feeling of being short-shrifted. Since its debut about a year ago, the mobile app for Google+ (free) has done just that. If you had an iPad, your options for using Google+ were to install the visually petite Google+ iPhone app or access the social network in a browser. Until now.

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Google has finally released to the App Store a dedicated, full-sized Google+ iPad app (free). The app mostly serves its purpose for browsing content, but avid Google+ users who want to reap the full experience of the social network will find it sorely in need of more polish. It's not nearly as well designed as Facebook's iPad app, which beat Google+ for iPad to market by nine months.

The big difference between Google+ and Facebook, especially in their iPad apps, is Google+ enables browsing, while Facebook connects you to your friends more thoroughly. The Facebook experience streamlines content in a much different way—and while not everyone will prefer this way, there's no argument that it's more useful for keeping in touch with the people you know.

NavigationThe navigation bar (see slideshow) contains buttons to access your home screen, profile page, hangouts, and settings. It also shows you new and old Google+ notifications. New notifications appear in white while older notifications are dimmed to gray.

From the Google+ iPad app, you can see your profile, but you can't edit it. The profile section also allows you to see content you've posted, which doesn't necessarily appear in your stream on the home screen, unlike in Facebook where your posts intermingle with your friends' updates. Perhaps it's narcissistic, but I prefer Facebook's approach because I enjoy seeing my own posts in the context of other people's posts to measure up how many comments and "likes" my content received.

Browsing Rather Than ConnectingWhat the Google+ iPad app does best is let you leisurely flip through content shared by people in your Google social network. You can follow people if you don't know them personally, which opens up the kind of content you might explore. Unlike Facebook, where friendships must be mutual, Google+ allows one-way relationships, so to speak.

At the top of the screen on the home page is a drop-down menu that lets you see content posted by people in your network, or "What's Hot?," or status updates shared by users in your geographic area. Again, Google+ opens up the kind of content you can find by not restricting you to your actual, real-life social network.

Google+'s signature feature is called circles. Circles comprise people you assign to a group. When you share a post on Google+, you can make it visible to only select circles or the public. In the Google+ iPad app, it's easy to add new people to your network and assign them to circles, but more difficult to see who's in a particular circle before you share something with them. For example, you can find new friends either by looking through the list Google+ suggests to you (mine contained about a dozen people I don't actually know, and only two I did) or by seeking them out with a search tool. Select a person to add to your network, and your list of existing circles appears. Tap the circles you've set up, which might include "close friends" and "business acquaintances" and you're done. But if you need to remind yourself who's in that "close friends" circle, you'll have to log on via the browser, as you can't obtain the details of your lists via the iPad app. You can see how many people are in each of your circles, just not their names.

Hangouts, or video chats, are supported in the iPad edition of Google+, but don't seem to be an ideal way for people to connect. You can initiate a hangout, restrict it to only the circles you want (a big improvement over the totally unrestricted way hangouts operated when Google+ was first unveiled), and even turn on or off an alarm that rings when someone invites you to virtually hang out.

Glitches and HitchesI hit a few glitches and hitches while testing the Google+ iPad app, mostly related to sharing new content and commenting on others' content.

First, when I navigated to an article that someone else had shared on Google+ and tried to also "plus one" it using the Google+ icon embedded directly on that site's page, Google asked me to log in… to Google… in a browser page that opened within the Google+ app where I was already logged in.

Additionally, when I tried to share a URL of a story that didn't come with its own "plus one" button, I copied and pasted the link into the status update area, but it didn't show a preview of the article, pull in the headline, or include an image, the way Facebook does.

It's also confusing that when you press the "comments" icon attached to any post—which only appears on posts with comments and indicates how many there are—a field to write comments, rather than read them, is what you get. To read the existing comments, you have to select the post itself. But who would write a comment without first reading what the other comments say? Pressing the comment icon should open all the existing comments (or the most recent five or so) as well as a field for writing a new comment. Why shouldn't existing comments and new comments appear in the same window?

I follow one fantastic person (Tô Minh Hieu) who shares some of the funniest and most provocative animated gifs I've ever seen. On the iPad, all those animations show up as static photos, making me feel like I'm missing out rather that tapping into my social network. Worse, Google+ generates a tag line below each of these un-animated gifs saying "Shared a photo," which makes it sound like all the animations are supposed to be static images. Browsing Google+ on an iPad can, at times, really leave you missing the point.

Google+ Needs Work, Even for Google+ UsersIf you're a heavy Google+ user—and dare I say very few people outside the technology sector are—the Google+ iPad app gives you a decent way to explore content shared by people you follow, despite whether they're your real-life friends. Unfortunately, the app has too many unpolished areas that make the app difficult to use a primary way to maintain your Google+ account. Sharing new content isn't easy and seems to contain some bugs. The commenting feature isn't well designed. And if your friends, acquaintances, and other people you follow post animated gifs, there's no way to know what you're missing. The app won't attract new users to Google+, and those who already use the service will be much happier sticking with the full website version.

Jill Duffy is a contributing editor, specializing in productivity apps and software, as well as technologies for health and fitness. She writes the weekly Get Organized column, with tips on how to lead a better digital life. Her first book, Get Organized: How to Clean Up Your Messy Digital Life is available for Kindle, iPad, and other digital formats. She is also the creator and author of ProductivityReport.org.
Before joining PCMag.com, she was senior editor at the Association for Computing Machinery, a non-profit membership organization for...
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